love of the present or his vision of the future, he soon learns that not
all epochs lend themselves with equal felicity to his purpose; he must
select that aspect of the past which is adequate in nobility and energy
to what he has to say, and he must select that aspect of the past which
will be understood emotionally by his readers. We are prepared, every
one of us perhaps, to admit the necessity of this twofold selection, but
to admit so much is to admit a good deal; it is to admit that not all
epochs are equally available for the language of art, and that though
we exist in our own time, it may be the part of wisdom and good taste
to derive our artistic speech from another period. When Molière’s hero
pronounces his scorn of artificial verse and contrasts with it an old
song of the people, he is rejecting a fashion that was contemporary and
temporary for one that was lasting. When Homer wrote of ancient Troy, or
when Æneas sang the founding of Rome, either poet was choosing the date
of his story with the same taste with which he selected his theme, or
selected the words of which to make his lines; he was choosing what the
race after long reflection had realized was dignified, noble and true in
feeling. The poet, whoever he was, that left us the _Song of Roland_,
no doubt was expressing a sentiment toward France which flourished in
his own day, and which may have been very foreign to the feelings of
the original Roland; as in the other instances, the old story had to be
changed and expurgated to make it altogether the vehicle of contemporary
experience; yet he was right in taking the great figure of Roland for
the outer clothing or language of his emotions, since heroic sentiments
had already connected themselves with Charlemagne’s peer, as they had
not yet with William of Normandy, nor with his immediate predecessors.
In English history there have been efficient and picturesque rulers in
plenty, yet the poets were right who have retold their national epics in
the story of Arthur rather than in the biographies of Alfred or Edward I
or Cromwell; for the Arthurian legend as the race has chosen to remember
it is of richer fabric emotionally and of a simpler structure than any
nearer and more actual history could well be. Theodore Roosevelt, for all
we know, may have been a greater man than Cromwell, and time may make him
seem more significant, but if the poet wishes to say things about the
strenuous life, he had better say them now through the image of Cromwell,
about whom our emotions are more classified; better still if he says
them through the image of King Arthur, who much more than Cromwell has
become a precise symbol in the imagination. Arthur was to have been the
hero of Milton’s epic—at least, Milton considered him for a possible hero
but discarded him in favor, not of Cromwell or Hampden, but of Adam; and
again the choice was wise, since Adam is still an image more universally
understood than any of Milton’s contemporaries, and we know what we are
expected to feel when we hear his story.
To say then that in writing, even when our purpose is art and not
satire, we should express ourselves in terms of the life about us, is
to lay down a formula which has been contradicted in practise by the
influential writers of the world. To find a language already wide-spread
and therefore intelligible, the artist will always draw to some extent
on the past, even though he does so unconsciously, and how far he goes
back into the past will depend on what it is he wants to express. In
_Henry Esmond_, Thackeray used the age of Marlborough to express a flavor
of romance that could not be said in life of a later date. But when
he had satire for his purpose, as in _Vanity Fair_, he chose a period
comparatively modern. It is but fair to observe, however, that Thackeray
follows this principle with very uncertain skill. The period he chose for
his great satire was somewhat more remote than for _Pendennis_ or _The
Newcomes_, where his purpose was less obviously and exclusively moral;
the resulting effect in each case is somewhat peculiar, since most of us,
unless we count up the dates, perhaps get the impression that _Vanity
Fair_ was the contemporary book. In one sense it makes little difference,
and we might use the illustration to indicate that it is the method of
treatment, rather than the life portrayed, that will make a book seem
contemporary. But we are left to wonder also whether Thackeray did not
intend _Vanity Fair_ to be more satirical in its effect than it actually
is, and _The Newcomes_ to be less so. Did the great but easy-going artist
make here a careless choice of the time for his story?
Even the writers who seem now to have been most contemporary were really
not so; what seems contemporary in them are eternal aspects of life,
which even in their day were old. We sometimes doubt the value of those
scholarly labors which search out for us the sources, so-called, of the
great poets, the residuum of earlier times which they adapted to express
their genius; but these labors would be justified sufficiently by the
answer they give to those who think that art speaks through contemporary
life. They think that we should look in our heart and write, as Sidney
did, or return directly to nature, as did Wordsworth, forgetting
that when Sidney looked in his heart to write, he wrote some masterly
translations and paraphrases of earlier Italian or French poems, and
that when Wordsworth drew on his personal experience, as in the immortal
lines to the Cuckoo, he recast an earlier fine poem by Michael Bruce.
The believers in the contemporary urge us to paint the record of our own
times as immediately as Chaucer wove his neighbors into the tapestry of
the Canterbury Tales; they do not know how many versions there were of
the famous tales before Chaucer shaped them to his own purposes. Indeed,
so much of the past has gone into all that we now are or say or do, that
the attempt to detach ourselves from the best that has gone before is
in a way a denial of contemporary character to our own times, or to any
other period; for the quality of civilization in 1923 which distinguishes
it from civilization in 1823 is the gift, for good or evil, of the
hundred years in between; and to be contemporary with any moment in
history is to be aware of all the past that still is articulate in that
moment.
III
If a writer fails to use the past as the language with which to express
his present, the reason may be that he does not know the past, or that
he has theoretical objections to using it so, even though the great
writers have followed no other method. But this reason is rarely the
true one. Today as at other times any sincere writer will be interested
in the great examples of his art, and will find them out, and probably
the same instincts will eventually show themselves in his work as in
the work of his predecessors. Undoubtedly there are poets and novelists
today who through a mistaken cult of the natural are striving for a
strictly contemporary utterance—rejecting, that is, all that they can
recognize in our speech as having a history. If their scholarship were
more complete, they would have to reject even the meagre vocabulary
of word, image and legend they are now content to use. But the writer
who willingly would avail himself of the full inheritance in his art
finds himself limited perhaps for another reason—he finds that his
readers do not know the past, that many of them cultivate an ignorance
of it, and that, therefore, if he uses it to speak with, he may not be
understood. It is part of the discipline which every art imposes on
those who practise it, that they must speak in terms intelligible to
their audience. It remains to ask, of course, who are the audience? and
the writer, if he is sufficiently courageous, stubborn, or hopeful, may
choose to address a more intelligent audience than he finds in his day,
an audience who he thinks will at last recover the traditional tongue in
which he speaks, and for whom it will be worth his while to wait. This
may seem to some of us the only way out, but we know it is a precarious
way. Such a brilliant belated justification came to the Greek classics at
the Renaissance; it has come in music to such a giant as Bach, who was,
as we say, ahead of his own day; but to expect it to come to us merely
because our contemporaries do not appreciate us is entirely too obvious a
self-flattery. The sane artist will rather do his best to say what he has
to say in language his day understands, and he will try also to encourage
his audience in the recovery of a larger language, so that he may say
more to them.
This question whether the reader has sufficient command of the inherited
language of literature is always an acute one for the author; the lasting
successes in literature have been made at those moments when a knowledge
of the past was wide-spread, and the audience were as familiar with the
older literature as the writers were. Historical as Virgil seems to us in
the _Æneid_, almost antiquarian, he offered to his first readers nothing
they were not familiar with, and little that would not immediately
kindle an emotion. In one sense then he may be said to have spoken in
a contemporary language. But neither he nor his audience would have
understood the doctrine that art becomes great by being contemporary, and
that it becomes contemporary by discrediting the past. “To have great
poets, there must be great audiences too”, said Whitman, and here, as
elsewhere, we are coming to realize, he got at the permanent truth of
the matter. For it is a sound observation of literary historians that a
country exercises its impulses toward art, in any period, as much by
what it reads of the older books as by what it writes; the two activities
must go together if the contemporary great writer is to get a competent
hearing, and they must be studied together if we are to estimate justly
the culture of an epoch. In what was produced, some decades of the
eighteenth century in England look to us destitute of poetry, but in
those very moments Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton were widely loved, and
enjoyed perhaps a more humane and significant treatment from the critics
than they have often had since. The weakness of contemporary poetry in
Addison’s time, in Warton’s and Gray’s, was not that they knew the elder
masters, but that their practise departed so widely from them and became
so contemporary. The revival in the romantic age was brought about by
rejecting the kind of art the early eighteenth century wrote, and by
building on the still earlier art the eighteenth century had the wisdom
to love.
In our day and in our land the question of the audience is peculiarly
acute, and it has been rendered more so by the intentional efforts of
those who believe that literature should be contemporary. Even without
those efforts we, who come from many countries, with different race
memories and with the legacy of different cultures, should have had
difficulty enough to achieve a common language adequately rich in
the best things of the past and welded into some continuity with our
American future. If we write in those terms which to an Italian would be
emotional, we shall hardly stir the pulses of a Scotchman or a Slav, and
if we waken the race-memories of the Spanish or the French, we may leave
quite cold the Dutch in Pennsylvania or the Swede in Minnesota. Our first
hope, to which some of us still desperately cling, is that we may lose
no one of these racial inheritances, but that by a jealous conserving
and study of each of them, and by teaching them all to our children, we
may build up one of the richest cultures that the accidents of migration
have ever permitted the race to compose. The literature of America in a
thousand years would carry in its majestic overtones the essential beauty
of all the civilizations that have made their entry through our ports,
the essential beauty too of the wonderful Indian civilizations which our
European coming dispossessed, and above these overtones, perhaps, the
far-off suggestions of the Greek and Roman worlds and the immemorial East.
But this hope, whether or not it could be realized, is so far as we
can see at present a fantastic dream; our progress toward it has been
slight—better, to be frank, we have made no progress, rather we have
lost ground. There is less general culture of that sort in the United
States now than there was fifty years ago. It has seemed wise to many
of us, therefore, to moderate our hopes, and to aim at mastering, not
all our heritages in common, but at least one tradition, and that the
tradition of this country from the revolution till the present day. Such
a program might be carried out in our schools—not in the colleges, since
only a fraction of the country’s youth gets to college, but in those
early school years through which all the boys and girls may reasonably
be expected to pass; and there would be nothing illogical in burdening
the schools with the task, for the training of a common consciousness,
cultural or otherwise, in a land of immigrants is the chief problem of
elementary education. We thought, then, that we might all absorb our own
past and the few decades that preceded our coming, so that hereafter the
spokesmen of the nation, poets, dramatists, preachers, statesmen, might
at least touch some common chords in us all by naming those who built
up the opportunities we enjoy. This program is still in force in other
departments of study than literature, but the teachers of literature
have been largely won over to the cult of the contemporary; so far from
building up in the land a great audience for the great poets to sing to,
many energetic teachers of literature are persuading these children, if
persuasion is necessary, to read only books of the day, about things
of the day, and by inference to neglect as really negligible anything
written yesterday or written about other times and other problems than
ours. Our dream of a cosmopolitan culture has shrunk in practise to an
educational discipline which will make us more insular and provincial
than we are already, more selfish, more contemptuous of other times and
of other peoples, and still further disinherited from great art.
The movement began a few years ago in a protest against the narrow
choice of books permitted by the requirements for entrance to college.
Some of the schools thought they could do their best work if their
teachers—and their pupils—could select the books for this arduous study;
there could be some wise consulting of taste, some adaptation to special
temperaments. So long as the choice was still to be made from books of
recognized merit, it was unreasonable to deny this request. But the trend
toward the contemporary developed quickly; if we consulted the taste and
the temperament of our students, the children of many racial traditions,
we found that few of the older writers were easy for them to understand;
the difficulty of bridging over the gap between traditions was too
great for many of our teachers to solve, or perhaps they themselves were
not at home in the tradition either of the books or of the students;
and the most graceful form of surrender was to study only what was easy
for everybody. The process was paralleled in society outside of the
schoolroom, in the change in ideals and in competence which overtook
professed criticism in our reviews; but the heart of the matter was and
still is in the centers of education.
A teacher of English in New York City recently presented the case for
contemporary literature vs. the classics, in some such argument as this:
When she was in college, she said, the faculty took such an inhospitable
view of the world about them that only one author, of all those they
studied in literature classes, was still alive when they studied his
books. She and her fellow students felt somehow cramped and cheated,
not to be studying more books of which the authors were still living. In
other words, whereas the critics in Mr. Shaw’s play could not judge the
work till they knew who wrote it, these lovers of the contemporary could
not estimate a book till they knew whether the author was in or out of
the graveyard. In these better days, the teacher went on to say, she and
her colleagues allow for the natural desire of their students to read
what is written at the moment—a life of a prominent man like Theodore
Roosevelt, the work of a columnist in the daily press, the popular plays,
the most talked-of novels. Such reading, she explained, gives opportunity
for ethical or social or political discussion in class; she meant, it
seems, that you can argue whether the Middle West was fairly portrayed,
and if so, what should be done to cure it, or whether we should have gone
into the war at all, or if so, what should have been done to make the
lot of the private easier, and establish the officer on a less privileged
plane. Out of this open discussion of spontaneous interest in current
events, will come, she thought, a finer taste for the best in art.
It is obvious that the training, such as it is, which is to produce this
finer taste is a training not in art at all, but in Americanization, if
you choose to call it so, in sociology or in politics. These purposes are
good in their place, but if they usurp the classroom where literature
as an art should be taught, we need expect no aid from the schools
in training us to a common culture, not at least so far as the word
applies to poetry, to romance, to the drama, to the novel. We might
Americanize ourselves in literature by reading our older poets—three of
them, Whitman, Poe and Emerson, of influence in the whole world today;
we might read our elder novelists, two of whom, Cooper and Hawthorne,
at their best were among the prose-poets of the nineteenth century;
or we might read Parkman, an historian not likely to be surpassed for
the beauty of his spirit, for the solidity of his method, and for the
romantic charm of his subject, by any who will hereafter write about this
land. We might read Lincoln, about whom we talk so much, and we might
profitably read Jefferson and Hamilton. We might even discover the charm
of the colonial records, north and south, and the heroic poetry of our
frontier, as it pushed through wilderness and across plain and canyon,
to face at last the Orient again and our inscrutable future. This kind
of Americanization would produce class discussion of some dignity, even
though it had nothing to do immediately with the art of literature, for
it would give us, not only a sense of our common destiny, but an escape
from our own circumstances into other days and other minds, and it would
cultivate the sympathy and the imagination once thought to be the fruit
of literary study. But to discuss always and exclusively only what is
under our own noses, to study a life of Mr. Roosevelt not because it is
a great biography but because it is about Mr. Roosevelt, and to study
novels not because they are good novels, but because they are about us,
is to find ourselves in the end just where we were in the beginning,
with our prejudices more firmly rooted and our skin a bit thicker to any
joy or sorrow in the world not our own. As for the ability to understand
great writing when it comes to us, we have learned only this, that since
Mr. Roosevelt lived nearer our day than Dr. Johnson, the biography of
him is a better biography and a more interesting one than Boswell could
write, and we need not read Boswell; and since Main Street is nearer to
us than Salem, Mr. Lewis is a greater novelist than Hawthorne, and we
need not read Hawthorne. Enough to know that the whole contains the part.
IV
Well, then, says the teacher of current literature, there never can be
any great books, for you approve of nothing contemporary, and every
book, unfortunately, has to be written in its own time. Yes, in a sense,
anything you write, on however remote a subject, will be of your time and
will represent it; Walter Pater was expressing one phase of Victorian
England when he wrote _Marius the Epicurean_. But the artist hopes to
appeal to more than the present generation; even the most contemporary
of our contemporaries, who read no books of which the authors are not
living, cherish some ambition to have their own works read after they
themselves are gone. And since the fame of a book depends on its ability
to meet the interest of readers over a long period of time, the life
of our works will depend on two things—on our gift for selecting the
matter which is permanently interesting to men, and on the willingness
or unwillingness of any generation to be interested in the same things
as its predecessors. If readers are now brought up to neglect as a
matter of course any works of literature that once were loved, there
will be no fame for any one hereafter, and no masters of the art, but
only in each publishing season a nine days’ wonder. But if human nature
still asserts its primal interests, in spite of mistaken teaching, and
continues to like in the long run the same things that have been loved
in the past, then the writer will finally be reckoned great who answers,
not the mood of his hour, but the spirit of those constant demands. He
will get his inspiration from life as he knows it; he will express it
in an eternal form, as we say—at least in a form so durable that instead
of our understanding his work through the incident that inspired it, we
shall know of the incident through the work. Molière has so immortalized
one moment of his times in his _Précieuses Ridicules_; without the play,
would we know much of the temporary affectation? And to be quite frank,
has not something died in the play, along with what was contemporary in
it, so that we enjoy it now with an historical effort not needed to be
at home, let us say, with Falstaff? Tennyson really immortalized the
Charge of the Light Brigade, for the incident on so many grounds has
since proved regrettable that we should be glad to forget it, but for
the poem, and we begin to be sorry that the poem is anchored to so much
that was transitory. Our own civil war poet, Henry Howard Brownell, true
genius if we ever had one, wrote his verses on the very scene, after the
fights he had passed through as Farragut’s secretary on the flagship,
and the virulence of contemporary passion is in his work forever, an
embarrassing alloy. But of the danger of being contemporary, Dante is the
great illustration. It is not hard to see what an impact his great poem
must have made on his first hearers, it was so immediate in its reference
to persons, places, incidents, crimes and disasters which Florence, Rome
and Italy well knew; but what an effort it is now to recover all those
allusions to the times, indeed how impossible! We wrestle with them, if
at all, because the greatness of the poem bears up their leaden weight;
and the poem is great for what is least contemporary in it, for the
vision which Dante drew from his masters, and which he handed on to the
future in images of the past.